SALAMA -
Swahili
Language Manager

Swahili
to English Machine Translation

Supported by the Academy of
Finland, we have
been working with
text-to-text machine translation from Swahili to English. We use a
linguistic approach and make full use of linguistic rules.

Currently
we have two different implementations of the morphological description.
In the traditional implementation we use a finite
state methodwith
two-level description. Recently we
have developed a new method for morphological description. In thetwo-phase
method,
as we call it, we first perform a meta-level description, and in the
second phase we expand it to the final description. With this
new
method we have been able to implement also the very complex verb
reduplication, which has not been possible with finite state methods.

Also
multi-word
expressions
of Swahili
are handled
with the Constraint Grammar parser.

Because
the word order in Swahili and English is very different, a number of constituent
re-ordering rules are
needed, as well as rules for handling the presence of some pronouns and
articles in English.

The
production of correct word-forms in the target language is carried out
with transfer
rules,
which, making use of the linguistic information of the source language,
transform the English lexical form into the needed surface form.

English to Swahili
Machine Translation

SALAMA is currently expanded to include also English to Swahili machine translation.
The English text is first analysed with the Functional Dependency parser of Connexor,
applied to English, and then processed into Swahili through several phases. The system makes use
of various development environments, including Constraint Grammar rules and regular expressions.

Bible
Translation

SALAMA was also adapted to Bible translation. The system was developed and
tested using Swahili as source language and Luganda as target language.